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Langley Community Music School is inviting young composers to participate in our Young Composers’ Competition. Composers will have the opportunity to work with the Rose Gellert String Quartet during a workshop where their pieces will be performed and critiqued by the ensemble and jury. Winning works will receive a public performance by the Rose Gellert String Quartet on Saturday, March 25, 2017. Submission deadline is March 1, 2017.

I was thinking about Narciso Yepes going blind at the end of his career and how he must have learned music differently. He would have needed to memorize chunks of it after first reading and this reading would have been by looking at the score with a large magnifier. Doing he would have registered the music as imagined sound with the internal images of where our fingers go to produce those sounds.

Pointing to black faces as an indicator of diversity is highly problematic. But so is saying that you "don’t see colour" as when folks claim to be blind to racialized differences such as skin colour. Scrolling through the faces of the Canadian Music Centre (CMC)’s Associate Composers, there’s literally not much colour to be seen; there are a handful of black composers, whereas there are hundreds of white faces—white men in particular.

The 2015 Toronto International Electroacoustic Symposium (TIES) coincided with an existential moment for me—perhaps a perpetual state of mind for us arts administrator types? I was a core organizer for TIES, and I spent part of my week questioning the legacies of various institutions in Toronto contemporary music, and whether we were taking genuine steps to support local artists establishing their careers in the 2010s, as opposed to the 1950s.